Prom 32: BBCSO/Gardner – review

Monday 8 August 2011 05.52 EDT
First published on Monday 8 August 2011 05.52 EDT

Mahler famously wrote no opera, though he came closest to doing so, perhaps, with his cantata Das klagende Lied, his first major score, completed when he was 20 and a startling work for one so young. The subject, prophetic of his entire output, deals with the power of music to illuminate both moral truth and the extremes of the human psyche.

A minstrel makes a flute from a piece of human bone he finds in a forest. But the instrument, when played, tells a tale of fratricide and erotic treachery that eventually exposes its perpetrators. The score meanders in places. Yet it also forms a reservoir of ideas to which Mahler was to return again and again, in the first two symphonies above all.

No one, however, could dispute its dramatic power after this extraordinary performance. The implacable tension of Edward Gardner's conducting and the morbidly beautiful sounds he drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra dispelled any thoughts of longueurs. Led by flame-toned soprano Melanie Diener, the quartet of soloists was finely balanced and contrasted. The BBC Singers sang as if their lives depended on it, while six trebles from Westminster Abbey chillingly represented the voices of the dead that return to accuse the living.

It doesn't get much better than this, and much the same could be said for the performance of Brahms's Violin Concerto, which preceded it.

The soloist was Christian Tetzlaff, who let the music live, breathe and sing with a directness few can equal today. Gardner got off to a low-key start with a sedate account of the introduction, though Tetzlaff's assertive first entry immediately raised the level of the proceedings to the superlative and beyond. Sensational.

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